Many headsets include one or more speakers for listening to audio and one or more microphones for picking up the user's own voice. For example, a smartphone user wearing a headset may desire to participate in a phone conversation. In another application, a user may desire to use the headset to provide voice commands to a connected device. Today's headsets are generally reliable in noise-free environments. However, in noisy situations the performance of applications such as automatic speech recognizers can degrade significantly. In such cases users may need to significantly raise their voice (with the undesirable effect of attracting attention to themselves), with no guarantee of optimal performance. Similarly, the listening experience of a far-end conversational partner is also undesirably impacted by the presence of background noise.
In view of the foregoing, there is a continued need for improved systems and methods for providing efficient and effective voice processing and noise cancellation in headsets.